John McCain: Iraq is "Unraveling"
More proof that if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail:
Arizona Senator John McCain on Sunday warned that the situation in Iraq is "unraveling" due to recent U.S. foreign policy actions there - and that a "very chaotic situation" could give way to a rise in Iranian influence in the region.
McCain, speaking to Bob Schieffer on CBS' "Face the Nation," argued that the recent U.S. military drawdown from Iraq is creating a dire situation in that country.
"It's unraveling because we didn't keep residual force there, because the President of the United States pledged to get out of Iraq," McCain said. "We could have kept a residual force there and kept some stability. And instead it's unraveling, and Iran's influence is increasing and there's every possibility you could see a very chaotic situation there."
Oh for crying out loud. That president who pledged to get us out? That was George W. Bush in 2008, you bonehead. If you had won the 2008 election (God forbid), it would have been you that would have overseen the final drawdown of troops.
There's no question that chaos still remains in Iraq. One day after the last troops left Iraq, an arrest warrant was issued for Sunni VP Tariq Al-Hashemi and just this Thursday, 73 Iraqi civilians were killed by bombs. However, I'm at a loss as to how continuing American troop involvement would mitigate that.
Worse, this just looks like yet another front to make Iran the next bogeyman to fear. George Galloway published an op-ed this week warning on just such an attempt:
Obama has officially announced what has long been known to be the new military doctrine — to draw down as many forces as possible in Europe and the Middle East and to redeploy into a more aggressive posture encircling China.
Hence the withdrawal from Iraq and the doomed attempt to exert influence there from an absurdly named “embassy” of 16,000 people including 5,000 mercenaries, which means that the private sector picks up the bill for their pensions, missing body parts and so on.
This is precisely the point. For decade after decade the US state could provide guns as well as butter in the form of rising living standards and economic growth. Now it can provide no butter. But it has every intention of providing guns.
According to its own warped logic it has no alternative.
Facing a growing China and shifting balance in the world economy, the one thing that US capitalists have is a super-abundance of guns which can be used to extract other people’s butter.
So don’t imagine that financial strictures and the strains of shifting the military balance to the Pacific mean that there is more likelihood of the US, with its allies, accepting Iran as a major, independent regional power in the Gulf — the most important oil-producing area on the planet.
The opposite is the case. It is more likely to lead them to calculate that it is better to “take down” Iran now, which is why they are concerned about Syria, in order not to leave a gigantic problem as they are forced to refocus elsewhere.
. . . who get the. Big wood just thinking about all the death and destruction war brings. And profits in the billions to GOP campaign donors.
Ghouls is right. They will abandon all reason and spend the next thirty years attempting to redeem their neo-con fascists dream they have been working on for decades behind the curtain.
"Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob"
-= Franklin Delano Roosevelt =-
So .. the US encircles China .. having zero effect on China's eventual domination of the world economy ..
Meantime the US squanders precious time and money in a futile efffort to hold China back ..
Who benefits?
US "defense" contractors .. and the Chinese economy ..
When will government of the people, by the politicians, for the corporations perish from this Earth?
Not soon enough!
They should be brought up for war crimes. That is the bottom line. And everyone in the media worth their shit should be calling for it on a regular basis.
This is bullshit what we did and it began with 9/11.
"Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
The things that republicans say are not intended to be factual.
They are intended to create political chaos, economic collapse, and a sense of crisis, so they can take power against the best interests of the American people.
Bill Moyers on the rise of NeoCons
Example of NeoConservatism
"Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob"
-= Franklin Delano Roosevelt =-
The other day he was getting the president and presidential contenders names all mixed up and not knowing it. When he says Iraq is that what he really means? Maybe he means Iran, France or maybe Tierra del Fuego.
prove it old man.
me-oww!
...has seen much better days. It's time to get out gracefully.
Lower the retirement age.
Too late for that.
'Talk to the hand'
Under sadam? 'terrorist haven', remember that part John McCain?
when we were occupying it? that just kept it at slow simmer. so we stay forever?
We may well not like the way things turn out over there, but how much is that oil worth?
We have already bred a generation of Iraqis that hate us and their opposing muslims, be they Sunni or Shiite. And I don't mean propaganda hate or religious hate, I mean blood hate from family losses.
Things will probably get a lost worse before they have a chance of getting better.
Don't forget about the Kurds either, they have problems with Turkey AND Iraq. That area is due to explode.
Wall Street is just a parasite on the actual labor and investments of average Americans.
Banks play with futures, debt paper, complex financial instruments, and other peoples incomes.
Sell 'em short & help 'em crash - Tear 'em apart & sell the pieces
i have no recollection at this time, could you repeat the question?
with a foreign policy marked by congressional investigations and undeclared wars for the last 20, or 30 years, 20 years in iraq is enough.
as for iran? or iraq for that matter, there are other countries closer to the situation than us, we sell them weapons, we aren't going to stop, maybe they should start using them instead of us.
despite my low opinion of theocracies, i find it hard to believe that the imams or muftis, or whoever is in power in iran would ever use nukes even if they had them, even for terror attacks; i would think that any country who openly used wmd's would have to know they risk getting a lot of people in their own country killed, and using wmd's for terror? you gotta figure the victim would figure out who did it. i just find it hard to believe that men of any sort of supposed god would risk the certain annihilation of their own people's major cities, maybe i am naive, let's hope i'm not the way things are looking.
really, come on, war materiel may count as gnp, but how productive is destruction anyway? out.
The U.S. got away with it. Just ask the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
One legitimate way to read history is that those with WMDs get their way and are invulnerable, and those who actually use WMDs become superpowers.
,, and just to quibble, what kind of use of a nuclear weapon isn't a "terror attack"?
Such a pessimist, his sanity is unravelling.
'Talk to the hand'
More booga booga fearmongering from an irrelevant political has been. Mental defectives like Mc Senile and the Neoclowns have to have someone to demonize and now it's Iran and the Muslims instead of the Communists.
The only thing unraveling is this kook's grip on reality which was tenuous from the beginning.
"We will find fulfillment not in the goods that we have, but in the good we can do for each other."
Robert F. Kennedy
I would ask McCain is, "why do you care what happens in Iraq while America is turning to shit due to the dysfunctional Congress?"
"I am very certain that this military engagement will not be very difficult." September 12, 2002.
"I remain confident that we will find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq."
John McCain, June 11, 2003.
"Absolutely. Absolutely."
When asked by Chris Matthews, "you believe that the people of Iraq or at least a large number of them will treat us as liberators?" March 12, 2003.
And my own personal favorite:
"John McCain has always been clear that American forces operate in Iraq only with the consent of that country's democratically elected government."
Michael Goldfarb, McCain adviser, July 9 2008.
Many more here.
Corruption favors the wealthy.
he wanted us to stay in Iraq for a hundred years.
And a paranoid nut at that. The whole point of the military draw downs and cuts in future military spending is somehow to encircle China? Would that be the same China which is now your largest trading partner in manufactured goods and one of your biggest investors? That China? Correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't the point of cutting down future military spending to reallocate those resources to other more pressing domestic needs? And isn't that what everybody here wanted?
Hasa Diga Eebowai
Shorter Sid McCrashup: "OMG, Iranians trying to influence Iraq for their own political aims! Who do those guys think they are - US?"
And just who the fuck unraveled it?
I'll tell you what's unraveling. It's Grandpa McPoopypants' underwear from the torrent of hot loose stools invading his pants, pre-dumptivly. Pack it in old man your alzheimers is showing on the campaign trail with Mitts.
at what point do these guys realize that we simply have to cut our losses and let the Iraqi's stand on their own?
We cannot support them any further.............true, we attacked them and destroyed what infrastructure they had, but we've invested quite a bit since them. Leaving was the right thing to do, and anyone who thinks otherwise can only be described as a warmonger ( or Republican).
During the 2008 campaign he was talking about up a 100 year commitment in Iraq with a "residual force" of the kind he's been talking about.
Of course, what he fails to mention is that Obama wanted to maintain just such a presence in Iraq, but was foiled by the expiration of the Status of Forces agreement Bush negotiated in 2008 and al-Maliki's refusal to extend it. And it was Bush who allowed the negotiation of a SOF agreement with an expiration date, forcing a withdrawal by December 31 2011. This was a nice piece of policy lock-in Bush decided to bequeath to his successor.
Like so many military people of his generation, McCain can't rectify Vietnam in any other way than arrogant determination to "get it right the next time," which, for him, has been Iraq. It's eating him alive.
The real line should be, "If all you are is a dumb hammer, everything looks like a nail."
Recent clips of him with Romney show his brain is unravellng.
Ed-words
is clearly illustrated in the criminal Iraq war now. What it did do & continues to do is make a lot of money fr connected republicans and skew our domestic life away from democratic progress. Without any accountability against the (unelected) executive branch, our government and our culture lives with one more American hypocrisy that, like slavery and economic injustice.
People like McCain are deliberately misleading the American people with this nonsense. Any body with an ounce of intelligence understands that had we stayed in Iraq the people that oppose us there would have looked to Iran for help in getting us out, and by leaving voluntarily we have lessened the likelihood of Iranian influence in the area. Iraq has never had a good relationship with Iran, and they are not gonna have a ticker tape parade welcoming Iran into Iraq as the Repubs would like us to believe. They are just to afraid to admit, publicly, their plan to start a war with Iran using Iraq as a staging ground. Which was ALWAYS their plan since the invasion 10 years ago.
since 1979 when our oil barons got kicked out. We propped up Saddam hoping that he could help us retake Iran, and when he failed to get the job done, he had to go. We had Kuwait provoke him into invading so we could step in and be the hero.
Years ago I used to think McCain had some common sense. But I have recently come to the conclusion, albeit unconfirmed as yet, that after the time he spent with Palin he must have swum in the same hot spring she did as a child and picked up naegleria. The brain eating amoeba.
. . . has shown him to be nothing but an embittered old man who didn't get something he wrongly thought was his birthright.
Mark P. Kessinger
New York, New York
... in one sense he's right: Iraq is unraveling. But this would be the case regardless of how long our troops remained there. It is sheer folly to think that the presence of U.S. military troops can, in a matter of years or even decades, bring any kind of meaningful resolution to the ethnic hostilities of that country that go back many centuries.
Mark P. Kessinger
New York, New York
The damage was done eight years ago when mccain and his fellow neo-con bandits [including the corporate media!] waged a war of aggression based on lies and propaganda. It was cruel, inhumane. It was illegal. It was reckless and foolhardy. There is no way to avoid or to evade this reality.
"Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob"
-= Franklin Delano Roosevelt =-
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